Kaine taps Warner as surrogate in Va.

RICHMOND, Va. — Nothing has managed to separate Tim Kaine and George Allen in the most stubbornly competitive Senate race in the country: not Kaine’s criticism of Allen as an uncompromising relic of the George W. Bush era; not millions of dollars of super PAC ads blasting Kaine as a free-spending, big-taxing cheerleader of President Barack Obama’s agenda.

With so little movement — recent polls show the two former governors locked in a dead heat in the mid-40s, as they have been for more than a year — Kaine is stepping up his pitch to the precious few undecided voters.

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For the third time this cycle, Kaine hit the campaign trail with popular moderate Democratic Sen. Mark Warner on Monday in an explicit bid for the 6 percent to 8 percent of the electorate who have yet to make up their minds.

“Letter after the candidate’s name doesn’t matter to them,” Kaine said, describing the voters still on the fence. “They’re looking to see who can best help people work together in Washington.”

Allen, campaigning for the seat he lost to Democratic Sen. Jim Webb in 2006, isn’t conceding the fight for undecideds either. He has designed a soft ad campaign targeted primarily at women who shun partisan labels. And over the past week, Republicans have become more confident about underlying trends in the race, particularly Allen’s standing among independents.

But in the battle for undecideds, Kaine believes he has an unrivaled surrogate in Warner.

The former Nextel entrepreneur cultivated a moderate, pro-business image as governor more than a decade ago and retains the highest favorable ratings of any Virginia politician.

Enlisting the senator was a pointed effort to reaffirm Kaine’s nonpartisan bona fides and rekindle some of the magic from their days as popular governors.

Most of the stops in their six-city swing through the commonwealth were within 100 miles of the Beltway. But the rhetoric of the duo was designed to sound like Washington was on another planet.

“What we need in Washington right now is people who realize that politics is quite honestly less about liberal versus conservative or red versus blue or even Democrat versus Republican,” Warner told a room of employees of Health Diagnostic Laboratory. “It really is future versus past.”

It wasn’t by coincidence that Warner made his pitch for Kaine at a private laboratory inside a biotechnology park that was developed when Kaine served as Richmond’s mayor and Allen was governor.

And though it was explicitly billed as a campaign event, absent were the predictable bellicose barbs that usually pepper stump speeches in the closing weeks of a race this tight and could determine Senate control. In fact, neither man took a swipe at Allen specifically or the GOP as a whole.

The dismay Warner did express was reserved for Congress as an institution — and the laborious process it takes to achieve even incremental progress on small-bore legislation. That’s why his case for Kaine was packaged in post-partisan prose.